IT - page 3

The biggest challenge for many business when dealing with the consumerization of IT and BYOD trends is often cultural. IT needs to cede control of devices, app choices, and where/when employees and executives actually interact with corporate data. That’s a cultural shift for IT. There’s an equal cultural shift that needs to happen when it comes to users and executives who must take at least partial responsibility for keeping their iPhones, iPads, or other devices secure along with the business data on them.

This requires user education and solid communication between users and IT. To be truly effective, security policies need to be endorsed by senior management and adoption and understanding of them needs to follow from the top down through the organization.

Unfortunately, that isn’t what’s happening in many businesses. In fact, the people most likely to ignore or violate such policies are C-level executives, members of the board of directors, and even IT.

There are a handful of intrinsic beliefs that Apple has as company – most of which came from Steve Jobs. The constant focus on building experiences rather than just products is one of them. Another is that Apple looks forward and not backward when it comes to technology. The company simply acknowledges that to offer its users truly great new experiences (and products), it cannot hold onto (and be held back by) outdated technology.

Apple often gets criticized for pushing its technologies and its users forward, particularly in business and enterprise IT circles. Despite that criticism, Apple may be doing companies (and users) a big favor by not supporting older Macs and OS X releases indefinitely as Microsoft does with Windows XP – and that advantage isn’t just about better products.

An IDC study commissioned by Microsoft discovered that supporting XP now costs companies and schools five times what it would cost them to support Windows 7 – making Apple’s forward-looking policy not only technically advantageous but also significantly less expense in the long run.

Often discussion around BYOD and mobile management focus on larger companies like IBM and VMWare (both of which have made big bets on BYOD). For larger enterprises, BYOD is a big change for IT professionals and users alike. Testing and transitioning to a BYOD model is filled with culture shock, challenges, and deeply held concerns about data and device security.

For small and mid-size businesses, however, the experience can be very different. That’s to be expected since smaller IT departments are often more tightly integrated with staff taking on multiple roles and less delineation of duties and job functions. Often this leads small business IT to be more agile and more engaged with the rest of the organization.

According to Nasstar, small businesses are employing BYOD in large numbers and with positive results.

Recently, we’ve done a couple of features on the core tools and skills needed by IT professionals who support and manage Macs and iOS devices in business environments. Knowing what those tools and skills you need is a step in the direction to becoming a killer Mac tech or multi-platform sysadmin, but to really succeed, you need to acquire those skills and learn how to use the appropriate tools.

There are a range of training options available with price points ranging from free online resources to professional IT training companies and Apple-authorized training centers. Which options (or mix of options) are best for you will vary depending on your learning style, the skills and experience that you already possess, and your budget.

In this feature, we’re going to focus on some of the best low-cost (and no-cost) options out there.

One way to look at the consumerization of IT is as a democratization of workplace technology decisions. Executives and employees alike have become much more sophisticated users of technology. Through iPhones and iPads, they see how well-designed devices, platforms, and apps can create enjoyable and, more importantly, productive user experiences. As a result, they don’t tolerate clunky business systems and slow IT responses as much as they did a few years ago.

Many executives and pundits believe this has already changed the balance of power between the CIO/IT management and the CFO and other executives. A recent Gartner survey found that overall, CFOs are leading IT decision-making more than they were just two years ago. One could even argue that in addition to disrupting industries like music and mobile technology, Apple is subtly disrupting IT and business itself  (with some help from other tech and business innovators).

Say the word apprentice to most people and you’ll conjure up the image of Donald Trump. You probably won’t conjure up the image of Apple products, data centers, or IT consultants. Apprenticeships were once the most common form of training for a career, but in today’s world college and universities are far more likely to be how most of us launch our careers.

With the demand for IT skills growing, however, the idea of adopting an apprenticeship model is an attractive one. Although IT apprenticeships are rare in America, they’re gaining popularity in Europe as a way for young people to join the workforce while receiving substantial training and real-world experience.

London-based consulting and training group Amsys has adopted an apprenticeship model that’s specifically oriented towards training Mac IT professionals.

This week, the Enterprise Device Alliance announced its newest member – London-based Trams. The Enterprise Device Alliance (a.k.a. EDA) is a non-profit group that provides resources to companies and organizations looking to integrate Apple technologies into predominantly Windows-based environments.

Trams is an IT solutions vendor and consulting company that provides services to customers in the UK, Ireland, and Northern Europe.

The company is the fourth new member to join the EDA since the beginning of this year (and the second technology integrator to join this year). The company will help the EDA expand the resources available to UK and European IT departments integrating Macs, iPhones, and iPads into their organizations – starting with a luncheon for IT professionals, to be conducted on June 19 at the Soho Hotel.

Update: We incorrectly posted that Cisco charges its users to participate in its BYOD program. While the company’s report does list an average $600 expense for employees making use of BYOD, that expense refers to the purchase of a smartphone or other device and not an additional fee to use the device in the workplace. Clarifications from Cisco’s Ross Camp are included at the end of this post.

Cisco released a new report on BYOD programs at U.S. companies. The survey provides insights into the prevalence of BYOD, how companies manage BYOD programs, and some of the costs associated with BYOD approaches. While those stats are useful and important, the biggest and most surprising revelation in the report came from Cisco itself.

In planning and implementing its BYOD program, Cisco opted to charge users a fee (on average of $600) for the privilege of using their own devices at work.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Although Good does provide device and app management, its primary focus is securing business data. To that end, the company effectively segregates all business information and documents on a device from a user’s personal content. To accomplish this Good’s iOS app delivers the same features as Apple’s Mail, Calendar, and Contacts apps – a move that ensures business messages event data are always secure. Good also includes a secure web browser and secure on-device document and data storage. The secure data store is sandboxed and can restrict users from copying data to unapproved apps as well as prevent such apps from accessing business documents or files.Good also provides a government agency solution that has been certified to meet various government and military standards for secure access including two-factor authentication.

Good leverages these technologies through a new solution called Good Dynamics that allows other companies, including mobile management vendor Boxtone who we profiled earlier in this series, to take advantage of Good’s secure data store. See our Good Dynamics coverage for more details.

Recent data shows that nearly half of all companies offer or provide Macs to employees and that the Macs represent about 7% computers in the workplace. That’s according to a Forrester report that was issued last month and that prompted me to write a feature about how deploying and managing large Mac populations in enterprise environments differs significantly from supporting a handful of Macs.

In that that article, I covered a lot of the tools IT departments rely on to handle large scale Mac deployments. Knowing what those tools are is a great starting point, but there are also several key skills that IT professionals managing and/or supporting Macs in business need regardless of whether they’re dealing with a half dozen Macs or upwards of a thousand.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Centrify’s DirectControl for Mobile offers free device management capabilities. Unlike many other management solutions, device management can be performed using mobile-specific Active Directory group policy extensions rather than any additional interface (though a cloud service interface is also available). Being a free solution, DirectControl for Mobile focuses on a handful of device security functionality. Centrify plans to extend the offering over the course of this year with a full featured premium edition. Although completely functional (see our review), Centrify still lists DirectControl as being a beta release. For organizations with minimal needs or limited budgets, DirectControl is a good option. Centrify also produces a Mac client management tool called DirectControl for Mac that uses Active Directory extensions for securing and managing Mac workstations.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Boxtone offers a range of mobile management capabilities for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. The company has strategic partnerships with multiple carriers as a device and expense management solution. Boxtone also has partnerships with companies like Good and Accellion for secure on-device data storage as well as a range of other enterprise technology vendors. These relationships can help integrate services that Boxtone doesn’t provide one its own. The company also offers a support and operation management capabilities that go beyond traditional mobile management.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

AirWatch provides a full range of mobile management features and implements all of the iOS 4 and iOS 5 management and monitoring capabilities. The software integrates with a range of enterprise technologies including directory services. The service works with a wide range of clients including small and mid-size businesses, large and enterprise organizations as well as government agencies.

Deploying a large number of Macs with a full load of software can be a challenge for any organization. There are, of course, tools that help ease the process of both initial roll outs as well as software installation or updates.

If Mac users also need the ability to run Windows apps,however, there’s an extra layer of complexity. IT departments need to to get Windows onto each Mac, configured, and joined to enterprise systems in an efficient manner. Adding to the challenge Windows on Mac deployments add to the good  amount of additional data that needs to be deployed – more than doubling it in some situations.

How quickly WWDC sold out this week – less than two hours and before many developers on the west coast were even out of bed – raises some interesting questions for Apple. Could the company have handled the announcement better? Should Apple allow more than 5,000 developers to attend? Is the current model for WWDC, which was adopted years ago, still viable given the stratospheric success that Apple has experienced over the past few years?

Last week, Microsoft pulled its Service Pack 2 update for Office for Mac 2011. As we reported earlier in the week, the update could result in the corruption of the Office database and issues with Office identity files could make resolving the problem difficult. After initially posting advice about the update and its potential problems, Microsoft pulled it from the company’s update servers.

Microsoft has now re-released the update. In addition to not creating the problems that plagued the original update, the new version will also correct problems for users that had downloaded the initial.

The entire situation illustrates why most tech companies, including Apple, advise business customers to wait before rolling out any new updates.

This year’s WWDC track listing has a focus that seems evenly split between between OS X and iOS development. There’s also a fairly even amount of material for both experienced Mac and iOS developers as well as those new to developing for Apple’s platforms. One track that Apple appears to have axed from WWDC 2012, however, is the IT or enterprise technologies track.

An IT or enterprise technology track has not been a guaranteed WWDC staple, but Apple has offered several times over the past decade. The track, which typically comprises the only non-developer events at WWDC, has always offered large enterprises and IT professionals things that they rarely get from Apple – a roadmap or sense of where Apple is heading technologically as well as insights from Apple engineers and other Apple-focsed IT professionals.

With the number of Flashback-infected Macs dwindling more each day and Apple’s release of software updates that can both clean an infected Mac and prevent infection or reinfection, it’s easy for IT departments and individual Mac users to think that the crisis has passed. That doesn’t mean that it’s time to forget about the issue of malware targeting Macs, however. In fact, the entire event has been a wakeup call to IT and security professionals as well as to the wider Mac community – Macs are not invincible.

When reflecting on the Flashback events of the past couple of weeks, there are five major themes or lessons for businesses and IT department to consider when it comes to supporting Macs going forward.

The iPhone and iPad are great mobile work solutions for many professions and IT is no exception. With the right collection of apps, virtually every IT job role can become mobile. Systems administrators, user interface designers, and even help desk agents can use their iOS devices to keep tabs on the technologies that they manage and resolve problem at any time from almost anyplace.

IT tools for iOS cover a wide range of ground from basic remote access to network diagramming. Here are a set of tools that no IT department should be without.

Almost every cloud storage service on the Internet operates using a freemium model. Anyone who signs up gets a certain amount of storage for free. When someone uses up all their free storage, they can add more for a fee. Cloud providers usually layer on a few extra features for paid customers like the ability to stream audio files or the ability to restore deleted files or older versions of documents. Just like most companies now, they to outsource the support process making it easy for clients to resolve issues easily. Netzen is a company that provides IT support to businesses in the UK, consider checking them out if you need help with your IT.

With so many free options, however, it can be tempting to use multiple services simultaneously. Add files to a free Dropbox account up till the free 2GB, then create an account with Box for the next 5GB (Box’s free limit), then create a SugarSync account and on and on.

This approach, known as cloud squatting, effectively nets users unlimited free storage so long as they’re willing to play an ongoing game of musical chairs with their data. iOS and other mobile apps that can access and edit files across different services make it surprisingly easy for users to become cloud squatters – and it’s surprisingly difficult for a business or IT department to prevent or deal with cloud squatting employees.

One of the traditional ways for IT professionals to highlight their knowledge of specific technologies and technical concepts is through the acquisition of certifications. There are a number of vendor-crafted certifications available as well as vendor-neutral certifications that illustrate competence in various technical disciplines like troubleshooting and repair, security, healthcare, and overall network management. Certifications have never guaranteed a job in and of themselves, but they do help candidates sell themselves to recruiters and IT managers.

One of the many challenges with the consumerization of IT, mobility, and cloud services trends is that they are dramatically shifting the skill sets required to succeed in the IT field. As a result, the perceived value of certifications has fluctuated as softer skills like business integration and project management have become more desirable. The need for professionals that have extremely specialized skills is being surpassed by the need for IT generalists.  

Last week I took a brief look at how managing a handful of Macs differs from managing dozens or hundreds or even thousands of Macs. Some readers asked how big companies like Apple, Google, Viacom, or IBM actually go about managing large numbers of Macs – both in terms of the tools they use and in terms of how their IT processes differ from supporting Macs in small businesses.

I can’t speak for how Apple manages the Macs of its thousands of employees, but I have worked with several large companies as a Mac IT professional – along with a number of schools and colleges, government agencies, and small businesses. Here’s a look at the tools and processes that they use to configure, deploy, and manage Macs on a grand scale.

There are plenty of stories out there about schools that have already launched large-scale iPad programs or that are considering them for next year. Many U.S. school districts have yet to determine an iPad strategy, however, and are still moving forward cautiously.

In a small survey of public school IT managers, research firm Piper Jaffray identified the iPad as a new technology being tested by the majority of public schools. The survey also offered insights into the the pros and cons that school IT managers are weighing when it comes the iPad and some competing technologies.

A new Forrester report on Apple in the enterprise shows that nearly half of all companies (46%) issue Macs to at least some of their employees. The report also notes that Macs make up a thin slice of the overall computing population in most of those companies – an average of just 7%.

While the report notes that Apple’s overall sales of Macs to businesses increased by more than a third (34.9%), it seems that Macs remain a distinct minority in most businesses. Given the business and enterprise dominance of the iPad and iPhone, the much slower growth of Macs in business can seem surprising by comparison. This issue has been debated time and again over the years and the more common reasons offered tend to be IT professionals having a preferences for Windows, corporate cultures favoring uniformity, and Apple’s refusal to act like most enterprise vendors.

All those are valid points, but one issue that rarely gets raised is that supporting a handful of Macs is a very different experiencing than deploying and managing a larger number of them. It takes a different set of skills on the part of IT professionals and, in most cases, it requires investing in a different set of tools.

One of the big fears CIOs and IT staffers have about the consumerization of IT and BYOD trends is that mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone combined with personal cloud services like iCloud, Google Docs, and Dropbox make it very easy for confidential business data to leave the office and the company network.While this is a definite fear for IT staff, how do most knowledge workers view the risk and the consequences of such so-called data sprawl?

According to a recent study, four out of five workers rank removing confidential data from the office as an offense that should get a person fired and yet 90% believe that it happens on a regular basis.